Terry Pratchett Quotes (152 Quotes)

People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o'course.

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,' he said. 'Have you thought of going into teaching

The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full- sized human to enter. The relevant equation is Knowledge power energy matter mass a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

Something as artificial and human as an hour wouldn't last five minutes here. It would be dried out and shrivelled up in seconds.

You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power... they will talk, they will gloat. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.

And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.

There's a door.Where does it goIt stays where it is, I think.

Humans need fantasy to be human. Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act, like there was some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged Yes. But people have got to believe that or what's the point My point exactly.

The Monks of Cool, whose tiny and exclusive monastery is hidden in a really cool and laid-back valley in the lower Ramtops, have a passing-out test for a novice. He is taken into a room full of all types of clothing and asked Yo, my son, which of these is the most stylish thing to wear And the correct answer is Hey, whatever I select.

It's either because of the number of times the scholar puts the boot into Peter Jackson the director of The Lord of the Rings films or is making a point they have never heard of.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out til too late that he's been playing with two queens all along.

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are 1) Silence 2) Books must be returned no later than the date last shown and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

I meant, said Ipslore bitterly, what is there in this world that truly makes living worth while Death thought about it Cats, he said eventually, Cats are Nice.

Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bull, was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it

But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that theres nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty and bloody-mindedness.

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.

The Quantum Weather Butterfly ( Papilio Tempestae ) is an undistinguished yellow color, its outstanding feature is its ability to create weather. This presumably began as a survival trait, since even an extremely hungry bird would find itself inconvenienced by a nasty localized tornado ( usually about 6 inches across ). From there it possibly became a secondary sexual characteristic, like the plumage of birds. Look at me, the male says, flapping his wings lazily in the canopy of the rain forest. I may be an undistinguished yellow color but in a fortnight's time, a thousand miles away, Freak Gales Cause Road Chaos. This is the butterfly of the storm.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink

It wasn't blood in general he couldn't stand the sight of, it was just his blood in particular that was so upsetting.

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.

Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

Of course, Ankh-Morpork's citizens had always claimed that the river water was incredibly pure. Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed.

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.Elves are terrific. They beget terror.The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.No one ever said elves are nice.Elves are bad.

He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting "All the Gods are bastards."

Sooner or later we're all someone's dog.

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

Nigel gave the lamp a cautious buff and small smoking red letters appeared in the air. 'Hi,' Nigel read aloud, 'Do not put down the lamp because your custom is important to us. Please leave a wish after the tone and, very shortly, it will be our command. In the meantime, have a nice eternity.'

Somewhere around the place I've got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger's Dog it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting.

He moved in a way that suggested he was attempting the world speed record for the nonchalant walk

When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there was no one there to hear it, does it - philosopically speaking - make a noise

An ancient proverb summed it up when a wizard is tired of looking for broken glass in his dinner, it ran, he is tired of life.

Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly worth living.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery It fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination - but